Team kindr3d (Discourse – Visual Forum Analytics) [2016]

We are kindr3d, team from sunny Frankfurt am Main. Our goal this summer is to learn as much as our brains can contain and create beautiful and informative statistics visualisation for Discourse (If you don't know what Discourse is you are missing out, go follow that link). We are interested in data (including books), all things web, feminism and food.

September 19, 2016

Yesterday was the second day of RustFest and we got to fangirl over many great Rust people who accompanied us through our summer. Some of them joined us at RustBridge workshop and helped us figure out, that return types have to be defined before hand. Today we joined team Joda for RubyMonstas study group and also did code review based on Max's wonderful suggestions. We are also trying to make sense of the last week and all the knowledge we acquired.

Done

RubyMonstas meet up and got to meet people who made diversity tickets happen, we are super grateful

learned about clearance authentication gem there

did github comment review and started to refactor

started writing horizontal bar chart for users component

ToDO

finish refactoring and rearrange existing code in a more semantic way

render the chart

September 17, 2016

This log covers both friday the 16th and our adventures at rustiest on saturday the 17th. We've met a bunch of happy excited people which just proves our suspicion that Rust is a cult! In all seriousness though community is great and people are genuinely involved. There were great zines, stickers and our first festival swag!

Done

users component in ember

all need queries in active record are rendered to front end

we also talked to our supervisor!

then on saturday we went to RustFest to fulfil "confront your ignorance" pattern

ToDo

Our lovely supervisor Max gave us some tips on our commits we plan to review

ToDO

September 14, 2016

Today we were once again reminded about the virtues of pure CSS and HTML. We also delved into the horrors of browser compatibility issues and W3C specs. Now we feel grateful to all these nice hard-working spec-writing people. We appreciate your work! The community is warm and caring, once again we feel humbled and happy to be a part of it!
To anyone reading this - thank you! Hope you are having a great day!

September 13, 2016

We spent the whole day and there is a lot of process. Many talks were very humbling and grounding, for the past months we've been working with front-end frameworks, however today we had to confront their fragility. Plain HTML and CSS are robust and resilient, so it would make sense to go back to the roots sometimes.

Done

guessing game tutorial in rust from The Book has messed with our brains quite a bit (Elvina)

ToDO

September 05, 2016

we were really tired of running vagrant and virtualbox, and after a bit of struggle installing discourse on our respective machines, we are finally up and running. Vincent gave us a nice intro to rust-lang and we worked on a small beginners project.

Done

a bit of logistics for our trip to Berlin (conference season here we come!!)

Installed discourse on mac

Intro to Rust: the very basics, notions of borrow/owned, mut, perks of unicode, rustc --explain is awesome!

Another sick day for one of us, so we spent the day working from home. Our talk with with Robin, although short and not super productive due to connection problems, was enough to reassure us after a somewhat frustrating day full of crashing browsers.

To Do

August 22, 2016

We are into the executive stage of the project and we started from some simple things. Robin wrote us a couple of hands-on tutorials which helped us understand ember components much better. We also created a new url for the admin stats!

August 16, 2016

Vincent stopped by and we analysed d3 bubble chart with force layout and collision detection. Also mentioned higher-order function and advantages of functional programming (also why anyone would use Haskel).

August 03, 2016

The day full of complicated Active Record queries and js this. We also talked through basic control flow in js and talked to Max about how best formulate complex joins (some native ruby as well). Looking forward to research how current admin reports are done in chart.js

ToDO

July 27, 2016

Today we spent a lot of time with our coaches. We had a planing session on our sandbox with Vincent, and worked on trimming the fat to clarify our original idea. We also managed to map out our db in both sql and active record which improved out overall comprehension of how things work in Rails.

Done:

sandbox schema

some playing around with discourse db and analysing more complex and informative queries

did some reading on pragmatic learning strategies + code complete

went deeper into Active Record api

To Do:

basic layout for sandbox

talk with Robin

move on to rails console with better understanding of AR

July 26, 2016

SQL in itself is a very extensive subject to learn. But it's time we move on to the next big thing: ActiveRecord! This adds a new layer to the challenge : talking database with Ruby (Object Relational Mapping here we go!).

Done

SQL review / practical exercises

Created skill map for the project, identified our levels of knowledge/needs

ToDo

July 19, 2016

Today we were back at Namics, where the air conditioner and the coffee open bar helped up being more productive than yesterday. However, the day still feels too short to fit the amount of stuff we want to do.

Done

talk with our coach Max on software craftsmanship and the overall qualities of a good captain (Kirk vs Picard)

July 14, 2016

After half a day of bouncing up and down the agitated waters of plugin installation in Discourse, we finally got started sending some queries to our database. We figured out the overall structure of Rails and Ember within the Discourse project, but would like to understand more how ActiveRecord translates into the real life db.

Done

wrote my first shell script (Micaela)

installed Data Explorer plugin on Discourse

learned more about Rails models and played around with queries

tried our hand at building and testing our own models

hangout with Max

ToDo

go on with the data exploration

try to render a chart in handlebars

July 13, 2016

The amount of stuff we need to learn seems overwhelming sometimes. However, today we finally feel like we are getting closer to delivering something Discourse users will appreciate. Our mentor Robin seems to believe in us, which gives us a confidence boost we have been needing.

Done

finally installed and got discourse running (it took a while)

had a talk with Robin

researched local (and not so local) conferences we could attend

surprise visit from Vincent and talk on advantages of Ember over Rails for front-end

short session with Nino on where to start the ember app (from the views, duh)

photo session with coaches for RGSoC promo

To Do

investigate admin dashboard and stats in Discourse

start populating and sending queries to our local db

maybe try to visualise some simple query results

July 12, 2016

It became painfully obvious that we work better together. Can’t wait to sit on the same sofa together again. There were some unexpected obstacles with Virtual machine, but the rest of the journey was rather quiet.

July 08, 2016

We had a kickoff call with the members of the team (unfortunately Nino couldn't make it), it was nice to finally have all the members together for a picture. Vincent came over to Namics for a coaching session where he talked about databases and some other (not so confusing anymore) terms relating to that universe.

That's it for week 1!
Heading off to the Hafenkneipe!

Done

played some more with d3, figured out how selectors work, learned about enter() exit()

Lessons Learned

July 07, 2016

[ Insert tip of the iceberg cliche here ] Dataviz is a vast subject and as we dip our toes into it it we start to realize the actual scope of our project. It is hard not to feel intimidated, but we have support and hope to reach the shore someday.

Done

reviewed yesterday's database session

looked up for conferences to join

setup d3.js environments

looked at AWESOME infographics which use d3.js

followed d3.js tutorials

fixed our blog

ToDo

Vincent will give a teaching session on databases

kick-off hangout / party with coaches, supervisor and mentor

Lessons Learned

realized upon fixing our blog that Tinypress is not that friendly after all

July 05, 2016

Keeping up with the sea-related metaphors, today we went off the deep end of Ember. We built our first ever Ember app together. While lots of questions were raised and some managed to get answered there's still a lot of stuff to figure throughout the process. There is a lot of "magic" features as much in Ember as in RoR that are still confusing and overwhelming to grasp. Maybe we just gotta get used to the conventions both frameworks use and deal with it. All in all it was great to finally start building stuff.

Bigger Picture Goal

July 04, 2016

Our second day was about meeting the team, arranging our working space and figuring out our work flow. We made a tour in the space we'll work in for the next three months and spend some quality times with our coaches.

Done

set up our formal position at Namics

discussed RuhrJS and d3.js

high-level overview of MVC and different paradigms

Nino gave us a master class on Ember.js

discussed areas of computer science we need to cover in the future

talked over impostor syndrome (everyone has it) and how to deal with lack of confidence

September 19, 2016

Yesterday was the second day of RustFest and we got to fangirl over many great Rust people who accompanied us through our summer. Some of them joined us at RustBridge workshop and helped us figure out, that return types have to be defined before hand. Today we joined team Joda for RubyMonstas study group and also did code review based on Max's wonderful suggestions. We are also trying to make sense of the last week and all the knowledge we acquired.

Done

RubyMonstas meet up and got to meet people who made diversity tickets happen, we are super grateful

learned about clearance authentication gem there

did github comment review and started to refactor

started writing horizontal bar chart for users component

ToDO

finish refactoring and rearrange existing code in a more semantic way

render the chart

September 17, 2016

This log covers both friday the 16th and our adventures at rustiest on saturday the 17th. We've met a bunch of happy excited people which just proves our suspicion that Rust is a cult! In all seriousness though community is great and people are genuinely involved. There were great zines, stickers and our first festival swag!

Done

users component in ember

all need queries in active record are rendered to front end

we also talked to our supervisor!

then on saturday we went to RustFest to fulfil "confront your ignorance" pattern

ToDo

Our lovely supervisor Max gave us some tips on our commits we plan to review

ToDO

September 14, 2016

Today we were once again reminded about the virtues of pure CSS and HTML. We also delved into the horrors of browser compatibility issues and W3C specs. Now we feel grateful to all these nice hard-working spec-writing people. We appreciate your work! The community is warm and caring, once again we feel humbled and happy to be a part of it!
To anyone reading this - thank you! Hope you are having a great day!

September 13, 2016

We spent the whole day and there is a lot of process. Many talks were very humbling and grounding, for the past months we've been working with front-end frameworks, however today we had to confront their fragility. Plain HTML and CSS are robust and resilient, so it would make sense to go back to the roots sometimes.

Done

guessing game tutorial in rust from The Book has messed with our brains quite a bit (Elvina)

ToDO

September 05, 2016

we were really tired of running vagrant and virtualbox, and after a bit of struggle installing discourse on our respective machines, we are finally up and running. Vincent gave us a nice intro to rust-lang and we worked on a small beginners project.

Done

a bit of logistics for our trip to Berlin (conference season here we come!!)

Installed discourse on mac

Intro to Rust: the very basics, notions of borrow/owned, mut, perks of unicode, rustc --explain is awesome!

Another sick day for one of us, so we spent the day working from home. Our talk with with Robin, although short and not super productive due to connection problems, was enough to reassure us after a somewhat frustrating day full of crashing browsers.

To Do

August 22, 2016

We are into the executive stage of the project and we started from some simple things. Robin wrote us a couple of hands-on tutorials which helped us understand ember components much better. We also created a new url for the admin stats!

August 16, 2016

Vincent stopped by and we analysed d3 bubble chart with force layout and collision detection. Also mentioned higher-order function and advantages of functional programming (also why anyone would use Haskel).

August 03, 2016

The day full of complicated Active Record queries and js this. We also talked through basic control flow in js and talked to Max about how best formulate complex joins (some native ruby as well). Looking forward to research how current admin reports are done in chart.js

ToDO

July 27, 2016

Today we spent a lot of time with our coaches. We had a planing session on our sandbox with Vincent, and worked on trimming the fat to clarify our original idea. We also managed to map out our db in both sql and active record which improved out overall comprehension of how things work in Rails.

Done:

sandbox schema

some playing around with discourse db and analysing more complex and informative queries

did some reading on pragmatic learning strategies + code complete

went deeper into Active Record api

To Do:

basic layout for sandbox

talk with Robin

move on to rails console with better understanding of AR

July 26, 2016

SQL in itself is a very extensive subject to learn. But it's time we move on to the next big thing: ActiveRecord! This adds a new layer to the challenge : talking database with Ruby (Object Relational Mapping here we go!).

Done

SQL review / practical exercises

Created skill map for the project, identified our levels of knowledge/needs

ToDo

July 19, 2016

Today we were back at Namics, where the air conditioner and the coffee open bar helped up being more productive than yesterday. However, the day still feels too short to fit the amount of stuff we want to do.

Done

talk with our coach Max on software craftsmanship and the overall qualities of a good captain (Kirk vs Picard)

July 14, 2016

After half a day of bouncing up and down the agitated waters of plugin installation in Discourse, we finally got started sending some queries to our database. We figured out the overall structure of Rails and Ember within the Discourse project, but would like to understand more how ActiveRecord translates into the real life db.

Done

wrote my first shell script (Micaela)

installed Data Explorer plugin on Discourse

learned more about Rails models and played around with queries

tried our hand at building and testing our own models

hangout with Max

ToDo

go on with the data exploration

try to render a chart in handlebars

July 13, 2016

The amount of stuff we need to learn seems overwhelming sometimes. However, today we finally feel like we are getting closer to delivering something Discourse users will appreciate. Our mentor Robin seems to believe in us, which gives us a confidence boost we have been needing.

Done

finally installed and got discourse running (it took a while)

had a talk with Robin

researched local (and not so local) conferences we could attend

surprise visit from Vincent and talk on advantages of Ember over Rails for front-end

short session with Nino on where to start the ember app (from the views, duh)

photo session with coaches for RGSoC promo

To Do

investigate admin dashboard and stats in Discourse

start populating and sending queries to our local db

maybe try to visualise some simple query results

July 12, 2016

It became painfully obvious that we work better together. Can’t wait to sit on the same sofa together again. There were some unexpected obstacles with Virtual machine, but the rest of the journey was rather quiet.

July 08, 2016

We had a kickoff call with the members of the team (unfortunately Nino couldn't make it), it was nice to finally have all the members together for a picture. Vincent came over to Namics for a coaching session where he talked about databases and some other (not so confusing anymore) terms relating to that universe.

That's it for week 1!
Heading off to the Hafenkneipe!

Done

played some more with d3, figured out how selectors work, learned about enter() exit()

Lessons Learned

July 07, 2016

[ Insert tip of the iceberg cliche here ] Dataviz is a vast subject and as we dip our toes into it it we start to realize the actual scope of our project. It is hard not to feel intimidated, but we have support and hope to reach the shore someday.

Done

reviewed yesterday's database session

looked up for conferences to join

setup d3.js environments

looked at AWESOME infographics which use d3.js

followed d3.js tutorials

fixed our blog

ToDo

Vincent will give a teaching session on databases

kick-off hangout / party with coaches, supervisor and mentor

Lessons Learned

realized upon fixing our blog that Tinypress is not that friendly after all

July 05, 2016

Keeping up with the sea-related metaphors, today we went off the deep end of Ember. We built our first ever Ember app together. While lots of questions were raised and some managed to get answered there's still a lot of stuff to figure throughout the process. There is a lot of "magic" features as much in Ember as in RoR that are still confusing and overwhelming to grasp. Maybe we just gotta get used to the conventions both frameworks use and deal with it. All in all it was great to finally start building stuff.

Bigger Picture Goal

July 04, 2016

Our second day was about meeting the team, arranging our working space and figuring out our work flow. We made a tour in the space we'll work in for the next three months and spend some quality times with our coaches.

Done

set up our formal position at Namics

discussed RuhrJS and d3.js

high-level overview of MVC and different paradigms

Nino gave us a master class on Ember.js

discussed areas of computer science we need to cover in the future

talked over impostor syndrome (everyone has it) and how to deal with lack of confidence